


Handmade

by notlucy



Series: The Brownstone in Brooklyn [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Knitting, M/M, Multi, POV Peggy Carter, Peggy Carter Lives, Polyamory, Sewing, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 19:58:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notlucy/pseuds/notlucy
Summary: Who wanted to learn how to embroider, or knit, or darn a sock when there were pirates to pursue and battles to be won?





	Handmade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crockzilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crockzilla/gifts).



Peggy had despised domestic pursuits as a child. Who wanted to learn how to embroider, or knit, or darn a sock when there were pirates to pursue and battles to be won? It hardly seemed fair that Michael was given free reign with his toy soldiers and his tree-branch swords on days when she was kept indoors by her mother, armed only with a cross-stitch sampler. (She did take some satisfaction in stabbing the needle rather viciously through the material, and if her fingertips were poked in the process, well, at least the resulting bloodstains on the work were sure to horrify her mother.)

Then, the war: the loss of her brother, her entry into the service, her time at the front. 

Nothing was safe or predictable in those days save the fact that if she cast a row of stitches onto one needle and picked up a second needle to work those stitches onto, she’d eventually produce something real. Something tangible. Something that made sense in a world that no longer had any sense at all.

She’d knit at Bletchley Park, using her scant hours of free time making scarves and cardigans for the women she worked with. The wool was hard to come by, so she made do. She would unravel old, torn pieces, knitting them anew into something practical, comforting and useful.

She made socks for Fred and Michael. Socks were easy; they went together quickly, and they were always hearing about how much the soldiers needed socks. Peggy liked socks. Socks were solid, they were practical, and they were something she could produce when the rest of the world seemed to be falling apart around her. 

Then, suddenly, she didn’t need to make socks for Michael anymore, and for a while she didn’t see the point in making anything at all. She broke her engagement with Fred and went to war, joining the MI5 and eventually the SSR. It was fulfilling, and she was damned good at the work. But sometimes, at the end of a long, frustrating week when it felt as though they were never going to make a bit of progress, she wanted something tangible. She wanted to cast on that row of stitches and make that tangible something. 

So the next time she was on leave, she left just a bit of room in her pack for needles and what wool she could scrape together. 

Soldiers, as it turned out, quite liked domestic pursuits. Peggy lost count of how many men she taught to mend their own clothes or knit their own socks. Colonel Phillips was a dab hand with a darning needle, and even Howard had once sewn a button back onto his coat. 

Steve, though, came to her knowing how to darn a sock and knit a scarf. His ma, he said, had taught him how, because she didn’t like the idea of him not knowing how to take care of himself, should worse come to worse. Peggy liked that, but then, she liked a lot of things about Steve. 

(James Buchanan Barnes, on the other hand, had been Quite Displeased at Peggy’s and Steve’s fit of laughter during his first attempt at turning a heel.)

So it was quite understandable that she’d knit a ten-foot scarf when she heard Bucky was missing in action and presumed dead. 

Steve, though? There hadn’t been enough yarn in the world for that. 

But life was funny. If you’d asked Peggy on the day Steve had steered the Valkyrie into the ocean what sort of future she would imagine for herself, she wouldn’t have been able to imagine any sort of future at all. 

Certainly not a future that involved her sitting on a couch in a Brooklyn brownstone, seventy-two years later, with her bare feet in Steve’s lap and a pair of knitting needles in her hands and a half-finished sweater in her lap. 

“Peg,” he grumbled, as her big toe jostled the newspaper he was reading because according to Steve Rogers, reading the Sunday paper was one of his singular pleasures in life. (The other singular pleasures being Peggy, Bucky and deliberately pretending as though he didn’t know how texting worked to frustrate Tony Stark beyond reason.) 

“Mmm?” she asked, doing it again and hiding her smirk. 

“Knock it off,” he replied, and she could hear the smile in his voice, even if she was too focused on the cabling needle in her hands to look up. 

“Sorry, darling,” she said amiably, “didn’t mean to. Just concentrating.” 

Steve harrumphed, just a little, but went back to what he was doing, and Peggy went back to her work. The sweater was for Bucky, though Bucky didn’t know it yet. She’d been working on it whenever he was away for work, which was a relatively new phenomenon as he’d only recently officially taken up the mantle of being an Avenger. They were still figuring out the details, and Bucky certainly had his qualms, which the three of them were working through together. 

(Still, from a purely selfish perspective, Bucky and Steve being gone for days at a time meant their Christmas presents were coming together a lot faster than they would have with the two of them hanging around the house all the time.) 

“Ha, you bastard,” she crowed in triumph, squirming with satisfaction as she got the cabling stitches knitted back onto the right needle and finished the row. 

She felt terribly accomplished, really. Accomplished enough that it seemed as though she ought to be receiving some sort of reward for the work. So she poked Steve’s paper with her toe.

(To Steve’s credit, she thought, some minutes later as he kissed his way down her torso, he never truly minded being interrupted all that much.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I am notlucy, Crockzilla's beta who is flipping the script and posting my own work for the first time in uh...ever? Well, since the last time I wrote fanfiction exactly one million years ago. I am old. 
> 
> A couple of notes:
> 
> 1\. Assume "a wizard did it" as every explanation of how Peggy ended up in the modern-day. Other writers do some amazing things with bringing Peggy into the 21st century, so just pick your favorite and assume that's how she got to 2017. ([roboticonography's "Flames We Never Lit"](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/pseuds/roboticonography) is my gold freaking standard for 21st Century Peggy.)
> 
> 2\. Peggy/Bucky/Steve are in a poly relationship, even though Bucky isn't exactly in this particular story. I'm planning on writing more if there's interest! More kinky stuff next time (because these three just lend themselves to kinky stuff). 
> 
> 3\. If you didn't watch Agent Carter (and you SHOULD), Michael is Peggy's brother who dies in the war, Fred was her fiance. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
